Archive for December, 2012

As a business journalist, I looked forward to information from a handful of specific sources each quarter. In fact, my quarterly e-commerce reports would wait until each of these select few companies, from whom I had come to expect great information, released their data. I relied on these sources for fantastic written and visual content our readers appreciated.

Now, when you have journalists and readers actually waiting on and looking forward to your content, isn’t that a massive win for your brand?

This is the power of sequenced content. Your audience comes to expect a certain type of product from you with each new installment. They subscribe to your RSS feed so they won’t miss it. They follow you in social channels to catch that first tweet once it’s released. They absolutely cannot wait to see what you’re coming up with next!

As consumers we make a few large priced purchases that we remember and many small cost items here and there. For the larger items we expect personalized care and service, whereas the smaller purchases may be out of our mind just as quickly as we’ve purchased them.

There is another category and those are the purchases that we make each month, without even thinking about it. Subscription based services are great, you get your service when you want it, your account is auto charged each month, it’s pretty awesome. Until of course it stops working.

You may have had the same experience as I have where you call, furious that your cable or Internet stopped working and reach an automated system, or are put on hold for what feels like hours. Fortunately, social media has provided an opportunity for these seemingly “unreachable” companies to help customers in need.

When you work in the digital world, there are insightful, smart and good people you “meet” online that you really look forward to meeting in real life. Ekaterina Walter is one of those people who I finally met at a BlogWorld conference 4 years ago.

Visual Gold

This new infographic from Marketo (client) takes a dive into content marketing campaigns of the future. Those that focus on creating visually appealing content in a way that still creates value to the readers. In this infographic you’ll find ideas such as:

Content Formats

The Five Pillars of Visual Marketing

Promotion & Distribution

Pope Joins Tweeting Masses With @Pontifex Handle
Benedict XVI will begin tweeting in eight languages beginning December 12th, 2012 using the handle: @Pontifex. The pope will use Twitter to respond to questions live during his weekly general audience. Not surprisingly, within only 10 hours of the announcement, Benedict had already reached nearly a quarter million followers. Via The New York Times.

After an amazing three days at a recent conference, it was time to head back to Minneapolis.

One crucial pre-flight ritual: downloading enough new content to my Kindle Fire to stay entertained during the 3+ hours of flying and airport time.

As I flipped to the Kindle book store, the first place I started was my recommended list. I will say that, overall, I am always pretty impressed by how well Amazon “gets” me.

In less than two minutes I had made my purchase. Without personalization, faced with the 1 million+ books which are part of the Kindle library, there is a 75% chance I would have never made a purchase at all.

Picture this: your company has exciting news to share with customers, shareholders, suppliers and your target market. You’re launching a new product this week and it will be debuted at a popular industry event, sure to be attended by media, influencers and people who will want to buy YOUR product, just as soon as they learn about it.

You craft the perfect press release and send it to 1,000 of your contacts. Twenty of these people think this is such great news, they each send it to 500 of their friends, relatives and business contacts. Five of those people pass the news on to 250 of their contacts. Of course, these people are all fascinated, as you’ve been able to include pictures, a video, and they all received the message within hours!

Implementing a successful social media advertising program is an art form. There are many opportunities for success and failure, which is why it’s imperative that you follow a set of best practices to increase your chances for success.

Defining what you want to achieve with your Twitter advertising program is a key piece to the puzzle and should not be skipped. Do you want to attract new customers to your company through education, engage current followers with exciting content, or convert fans into customers? This post shares 4 basic tips for using Twitter advertising as part of your ongoing social strategy.

Tip 1: Pin To the Top of Your Timeline

In a few weeks this business blog will be 9 years old. That’s 3,145 posts overall, of which I have written 2,537 myself.

If someone would have suggested to me 9 years ago that I should write 1.2 million words as a key component of my agency’s online marketing strategy, I would have dismissed them as crazy. And yet here we are.

I know a lot of companies have dabbled in blogging with mixed results and many are considering either starting a blog or scaling their blogging efforts. There are reasonable questions about how a business blog will add value to the bottom line. How will a corporate blog contribute to leads and sales? What is the ROI of blogging for each quater, month, week, day, hour and dollar invested? Those are great questions.